Opera Reviews
Tristan und Isolde, Royal OperaWednesday, 30 September 2009
There’s nothing like a bit of communal booing to sharpen your critical faculties. And Christof Loy’s new production of Tristan und Isolde at the Royal Opera House last night received wave after wave after wave of it. An ocean of boos almost as deep and profound as the Wagner that had just washed over us moments before. Read more... |
Werther, Opera NorthSunday, 27 September 2009Werther is based on the young Goethe’s semi-autobiographical epistolary novel which tells of a young artist’s thwarted love for a simple country girl who is already engaged. First performed in Vienna in 1892, it is audibly a product of that time. You can hear the predominant influence of Wagner in piquant unresolved dissonances, suggestive of a fleeter-footed, gallic Tristan with added harps. The sheer depth and splendour of the music is what makes a potentially risible... Read more... |
Le Grand Macabre, ENOFriday, 18 September 2009
Door-sized detachable nipples, an angel of death with a dick to die for (literally), a cave of an arse housing a disco-dancing unit of storm troopers and an all-singing all-dancing couple of randy cadavers. Ever wondered what the Europeans might have done if they’d ever got hold of the Carry On brand? The ENO’s new production of Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre offers up one possibility. Read more... |
Don Carlo, Royal OperaTuesday, 15 September 2009
It finally came just over three hours in. Ferruccio Furlanetto’s gouty Philip II leans his elbow on his chair and begins to grind his head into his right-hand like he's a human pestle and mortar. He first castigates himself for ever having thought that his wife, Elizabeth of Valois - who he suspects of sleeping with his son, Don Carlos - might have fancied his unyielding, aged presence, and then tries to sing his way out of his tortured predicament. Read more... |
Linda di Chamounix, Royal OperaTuesday, 15 September 2009
The hills are alive with the sound of... well, Donizetti, actually. His mature "Melodramma Semiserio" Linda di Chamounix arrived towards the climax of a prolific career in opera and was clearly a late attempt to capitalise on his successes and give his adoring audiences a little of everything and at great length. This season-opener concert performance at the Royal Opera (recorded, incidentally, by Opera Rara...
Read more...
|
Così fan tutte, Grand Theatre, LeedsSaturday, 12 September 2009The film critic Mark Kermode maintains that if a film is advertised on the side of a bus, it will inevitably be rubbish. Opera North are advertising this revival of Tim Albery’s 2004 Così fan tutte extensively on the sides of buses here in Leeds. Kermode’s theorem evidently doesn’t hold for opera. Read more... |
Doctor Atomic, ENOTuesday, 23 June 2009
Among the most astonishing moments in John Adams's new opera Doctor Atomic (currently running at the English National Opera) is an aria at the end of the first act. The eponymous brains behind the Manhattan Project, Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer, stands alone on stage with his new creation, a spherical A-bomb coated in wires and tubes like a patient in intensive care, and sings John Donne's holy sonnet "Batter my heart, three-person'd God". Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
Edinburgh’s Rezillos were booked to play Middlesbrough’s Rock Garden on Wednesday 14 September 1977. “I Can’t Stand my Baby,” their debut single,...
The last of the old maestros is standing tall. Marco...
Cricket has always been a lens through which to examine the legacy of the British Empire. In the 1930s, the infamous Bodyline series saw the new...
Earthrise, the 1968 Apollo 8 photograph of our small island of a planet, taken from the Moon’s surface, transformed our vision of our...
The thing with Annie Clark, better known as the triple-Grammy-winning iconoclast St Vincent, is that much like an actual saint the multi...
With a troubled gaze and a lived-in face, the portrait of artist Alberto Giacometti on a withdrawn...
The French cellist Christian-Pierre La Marca confesses that – like so many classical musicians...
In director Pat Collins’s lyrical adaptation of John McGahern’s last novel, with cinematography by Richard Kendrick, the landscape is perhaps the...